Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.

Written by Andra Garcia-Vargas for Nerve. Originally published on July 10, 2013.

“I should have been every Venture Capitalist’s wet dream,” Cindy Gallop said to me as I sat in her trendy Chelsea apartment, discussing her start-up, “Make Love Not Porn.” She’s said the same thing to USA Today, to Venture Village, and to other outlets when her platform for “real world sex” videos came out. “Every VC’s wet dream”—It’s an incredibly catchy phrase, one full of thrill, of possibility.

But this is reality: Neither MLNP—which crowdsources videos of ordinary people having genuine, “real-world” sex—nor other sex-oriented tech start-ups are VC’s wet dreams. They’re not the wet dreams of Android, of iOS, of Google Glass, or of banks. For months, MLNP was unable to set up accounts at PayPal, at Amazon, even at Chase Bank, which made it impossible at first to provide the $5 “#realworldsex” rentals to their audience that is their revenue model. Another sex-oriented tech company, Mikandi, released the app Tits N Glass about three weeks ago, especially designed for Google Glass.”